The Treatment of Arab Israelis

6.

THE TREATMENT OF ARAB ISRAELIS

Is Zionism Racism?

On Friday, 14 May 1948, the Jewish leadership in Palestine proclaimed the independent state of Israel. On that occasion, Ben-Gurion, the first Prime Minister of the newly established state, declared to his audience (and to the world) that

“The state of Israel would be open to the immigration of Jews from all countries, would promote the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants, would be based on the principles of liberty, justice and peace, would uphold the full social and political equality of all its citizens, without distinction of religion, race or sex, would guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, education and culture, would safeguard the holy places of all religions and would uphold the principles of the UN Charter.” (emphasis added)

He then called on its Arab inhabitants to contribute to the development of the country on the basis of “full and equal citizenship”.

The subsequent treatment of the Arab Israelis would fall far short of the rights, duties and privileges of citizenship guaranteed to them on this auspicious occasion. It will be recalled that Zionism evolved out of the conviction that the only way to protect Jews from persecution was to provide for them a refuge which was overwhelmingly, if not exclusively, Jewish. That objective was certainly achieved on May 14, 1948 (albeit through the massacre of thousands of Palestinian Arabs and the forced expulsion of hundreds of thousands more). The 750,000 Arabs who fled their homes represented the vast majority of the Palestinian people living in the land that became Israel. About 150,000 remained and became citizens of Israel. They were concentrated in three areas: the Galilee, particularly around Nazareth; the “Little Triangle”, a narrow strip of land on the western edge of the West Bank which had been ceded by Transjordan in the armistice negotiations; and in the northern part of the Negev. Did the state of Israel “promote the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants”, as promised in the Declaration of Independence? Or did the creation of the state of Israel mean that “Jews and their demands were superior, taking precedence over any other interests within that refuge”?

Legal Mechanisms of Discrimination

The lofty rhetoric about “the full social and political equality of all its citizens” notwithstanding, Israel has always identified itself not as a state of its Jewish and Arab citizens, but as Der Judenstaat (the Jewish state), i.e. as the state of all Jews everywhere in the world. Not surprisingly, the institutions of state have guaranteed for Jews certain rights and benefits which have been denied to Arabs. In other words, Arab citizens of the state of Israel have been discriminated against by successive Israeli governments solely on the basis of their ethnicity. Various laws were passed which gave preferential treatment to Jews, and to the detriment of the Arabs:

• The Law of Return (1950). This law was described by Ben-Gurion as “the peculiar sign that singles out the State of Israel and fixes its central mission, the Zionist-Jewish mission …. the foundation scroll of the rights of the Jewish people in Israel.” It gives the right to settle in Israel automatically to all Jews, regardless of their place of birth. By contrast, Palestinian refugees and other displaced persons who were born in, and until recently inhabited the land, enjoyed no such right.
• The Law of Citizenship (1952). Jewish immigrants were awarded automatic citizenship, whereas Palestinians still living in what became Israel were not. They had to apply for citizenship, and were frequently turned down.
• The National Insurance Law (1953). This offered generous child benefits, as a way of stimulating population growth. But when it was discovered that the Arabs had a higher birth rate than the Jews, the law was repealed.
• Exclusion from Military Service. Most Arabs were disqualified from military service, thereby making them ineligible for any of the benefits enjoyed by their Jewish counterparts. For example, the Discharged Soldiers Act of 1949 was amended in 1970 to provide soldiers’ families with special benefits, such as welfare grants, housing entitlements, etc. Many jobs are reserved for ex-soldiers, allowing employers to remove Arabs from the pool of applicants.
• The Military Administration. Jewish forces had taken control of a number of areas which were allocated by the UN partition plan of 1947 to the putative Arab state. Ben-Gurion established a Military Administration in all of them, as well as in some of the Arab areas which lay within the Jewish state. Thus about 80% of the Arab population of Israel came to be ruled by military governors, who exercised almost complete control over their lives:

“The presiding officials could detain or imprison local inhabitants without charges or trial for an indefinite period, expel them from the country, confiscate or destroy their property, and prohibit them from working or pursuing any other kind of activity. They were also empowered to close off entire areas for indefinite periods. All of this was done in the name of security, and no proof was required to justify any action in any court of law. In fact, by order of the Ministry of Defense, the Military Administration was immune from any interference by legislative or judicial authorities.”

These sweeping powers derived from Article 125 of the defunct Defence (Emergency) Regulations of 1945, originally created by the British mandate and re-activated by Israel. Shortly after the promulgation of these regulations by the British, the Jewish Lawyers’ Association demanded their repeal. As Ya’acov Shapira, an eminent Jewish lawyer, put it,

“There were no such laws even in Nazi Germany … It is our duty to tell the whole world that the Defense Laws passed by the British Mandatory Government in Palestine destroy the very foundations of justice in this land … No government has the right to pass such laws.”

When Shapira became Attorney General in Israel’s government, he changed his tune, saying “It is one thing for the military to use someone else’s law. It is quite another for the Knesset to enact as its own a preventive detention law.”

In theory, these provisions applied to all those living in certain areas, but in practice they applied to Arabs only. The authority of the Military Administration lasted until 1966, when it was abolished by the Knesset.

Expropriation of Arab Land. At the time partition of Palestine was proposed by the UN, the Jews owned less than 8 per cent of the land. Now that the state of Israel was established, additional land would be needed for the vast influx of Jewish immigrants which was anticipated. Survivors of the holocaust in Europe who had been languishing in displaced persons’ camps in Germany, Austria and Italy poured into Israel. So did the inmates of the detention camps in Cyprus, where the British authorities had sent hundreds of illegal immigrants. “At the same time some 37,260 Jews arrived from Bulgaria, 34,547 from Turkey, 7661 from Yugoslavia, 100,000 from Poland and 120,000 from Romania.” In order to provide for the needs of these immigrants, the Israeli government resorted, inter alia, to the expedient of land expropriation, legitimized under the umbrella of more than thirty different laws. Perhaps the most pernicious of these was the Absentee Property Law (1950), according to which,

“Any Arabs who left their places of residence between November 29, 1947, and September 1, 1948, either to go to areas outside Palestine or to areas within Palestine that were occupied by active Arab military forces, would be considered absentees and their property subject to appropriation by the Custodian of Enemy Property (an office soon replaced by the Custodian of Absentees’ Property.”

The Absentee Property Law defined “absentee” so loosely that Arabs who, during the war, left one location within what would become the state of Israel for another (for example, from Haifa to Nazareth) were considered absent and hence could have their properties confiscated. As a result of this law, a novel and interesting citizen category was created as internally displaced Palestinians became "present absentees". Article 19(a) forbids the Custodian to sell land acquired under the Absentee Property Law, or otherwise transfer the ownership to a third party other thanaDevelopment Authority established by the Knesset. Six months after the enactment of the Absentee Property Law, such an authority was established by the Development Authority (Transfer of Property) Law of 1950. It is estimated thatby 1959, the Custodian had administered 3,250,000 dunams (1 dunam = 0.25 acre), most of which was transferred to the Developing Authority.

The Israeli authorities also confiscated Arab lands for "public purposes" by re-activating, and selectively applying, the Mandatory Lands (Acquisition for Public Purposes) Ordinance of 1943. Arab lands expropriated for “public purposes” were later used for the benefit of Jews only. For example, 1200 dunams in Arab Nazareth were expropriated in 1953, ostensibly to build government offices. In fact, only 80 dunams were used for this purpose, the rest being used to build residential units which became the nucleus of Jewish Upper Nazareth. Another 3,000 dunams in El-Battof plain (Galilee) were expropriated in 1965. In addition, almost 5100 Dunams of the lands of B’aneh, Der-Al-Asad were expropriated in 1966 on which the city of Carmi’el was later built.

Another law that played an important role in land confiscation was the Land Acquisition (Validity of Acts and Compensation) Law of 1953, according to which land could be expropriated from any landowner who was not in actual possession of the land. The objective of the law was to "validate" retroactively the taking over of Arab-owned lands for military purposes or for use by existing or newly established Jewish settlements. Yet another law, the Emergency Regulations (Exploitation of Uncultivated land) of 1948, patterned after the legal practice in the Ottoman empire, gave the Minister of Agriculture the authority to confiscate any uncultivated land. However, these laws by themselves failed to address the problem of land owned, possessed and cultivated by Arabs. The Israeli High Court therefore rendered a definition of possession that emphasized "practical usage". The effect of this ruling was that land which was not cultivated on a daily basis could be considered to be “not fully used”, and therefore liable to confiscation. Of course, until 1966, Arab villagers were subject to the jurisdiction of the Military Administration, which had the power to designate their villages as “closed military areas” for indeterminate periods of time, and to withhold permission for them to enter their farms in order to tend to their crops. Thus, in conjunction with the operations of the Military Administration, these laws proved to be an extremely powerful tool for dispossessing Arab citizens of Israel of their land.

The extent of this orgy of land and property expropriation was described in 1952 by Joseph Schechtman, an expert on population transfer:

“2,990,000 dunams (739,750 acres) of formerly Arab-owned land, including olive and orange groves, vineyards, citrus orchards, and assorted tree gardens, became totally deserted as a result of the mass flight. … In addition, 73,000 dwelling rooms in abandoned Arab houses and 7,800 shops, workshops and storerooms became ownerless in towns and villages.”

Schechtman goes on to explain how all this property (including bank accounts, totaling up to 5 million Palestinian pounds, which were frozen by the Israeli government) was used:

“It is difficult to overestimate the tremendous role this lot of abandoned Arab property has played in the settlement of hundreds of thousands of Jewish immigrants who have reached Israel since the proclamation of the state in May, 1948. Forty-seven new rural settlements established on the sites of abandoned Arab villages had by October 1949 already absorbed 25,255 new immigrants. By the spring of 1950 over 1 million dunams had been leased by the custodian to Jewish settlements and individual farmers for the raising of grain crops.

Large tracts of land belonging to Arab absentees have also been leased to Jewish settlers, old and new, for the raising of vegetables. In the south alone, 15,000 dunams of vineyards and fruit trees have been leased to cooperative settlements; a similar area has been rented by the Yemenites Association, the Farmers Association, and the Soldiers Settlement and Rehabilitation Board. This has saved the Jewish Agency and the government millions of dollars. While the average cost of establishing an immigrant family in a new settlement was from $7,500 to $9,000, the cost in abandoned Arab villages did not exceed $1,500 ($750 for building repairs and $750 for livestock and equipment).

Abandoned Arab dwellings in towns have also not remained empty. By the end of July, 1948, 170, 000 people, notably new immigrants and ex-soldiers, in addition to about 40,000 former tenants, both Jewish and Arab, had been housed in premises under the custodian’s control; and 7,000 shops, workshops, and stores were sublet to new arrivals. The existence of these Arab houses – vacant and ready for occupation – has, to a large extent, solved the greatest immediate problem which faced the Israeli authorities in the absorption of immigrants. It also considerably relieved the financial burden of absorption.”

Thus, as reported by the US Library of Congress,

"The property of the Arabs who were refugees outside the state and the property expropriated from the Arabs who remained in Israel became a major asset to the new state. According to Don Peretz, an American scholar, by 1954 'more than one-third of Israel's Jewish population lived on absentee property, and nearly a third of the new immigrants (250,000 people) settled in urban areas abandoned by Arabs'. The fleeing Arabs emptied thriving cities such as Jaffa, Acre (Akko), Lydda (Lod), and Ramla, plus '338 towns and villages and large parts of 94 other cities and towns containing nearly a quarter of all the buildings in Israel'."

The Jewish National Fund (JNF) was created for the purpose of land acquisition and development. It was originally registered in Britain as a private corporation, but was given administrative responsibility for state-owned land, courtesy of the Israel National Fund Law of 1953. Over ninety percent of the land in Israel is owned by the state; it is held "in trust" for the Jewish people by the JNF, which has adopted the policy of the early Zionist settlers that land, once acquired by a Jewish organization, could never be sold or leased to a non-Jew. The important difference is that the JNF now functions, not in its capacity as a private corporation, but as the operating and controlling agency of the Land Development Authority of the state of Israel. Arab citizens of Israel are excluded from the operations of the JNF, either as participants or as beneficiaries. To make matters worse, there are no government organizations which perform the same functions for Arabs. They are denied access to the land -- they may not buy it, and in most instances they may not even rent it -- even though much of it was owned by them before 1948. They have, in other words, been subjected to a legally irreversible loss of their property.

While the Jewish National Fund deals with land acquisition and development, the Jewish Agency, deals primarily with Jewish immigration matters. In 1953, the Knesset passed the World Zionist Organization and Jewish Agency (Status) Law, under which these two “national organizations” carry out certain government functions (housing services, infrastructure development, etc.) specifically for Jews under an official mandate from the Israeli government. Since there is no Israeli Constitution, the discretion entrusted to these “national organizations” results in, and endorses, significant de facto discrimination against Israel's Palestinian Arab citizens.

“Recognized” and “Unrecognized” Villages

The Israeli government classifies Palestinian localities as either “recognized” or “unrecognized”. This classification appears to reflect the government’s desire to concentrate its Palestinian Arab citizens in limited urban areas of the country. It has gone to great lengths to dissuade them from living in the unrecognized villages, designating much of the land around them as “agricultural land”, “military areas” or “national parks”, where construction is forbidden.

Recognized localities are zoned for housing/construction or for agriculture. While Palestinians exercise some control over areas zoned for housing, the agricultural sectors are strictly overseen by regional councils under Jewish control. These regional councils are reluctant to allocate either land for housing or building permits to keep pace with the growth of the Palestinian Arab population. Not surprisingly, there has been a proliferation of “illegal” houses, which are subject to demolition by the Israeli authorities. According to the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD), the housing shortage in Palestinian neighborhoods in Jerusalem is approximately 25,000 units, with 2,000 demolition orders pending. As if to rub salt in the wounds of homeless Palestinians, violators are forced to defray the cost of demolition, including policing the operation.

As bad as conditions for Palestinians in “recognized” villages might be, they come nowhere near the abominations faced by residents of “unrecognized” villages, who are denied all government services, such as connection to the electric and water grids, sewage and refuse disposal, proper access roads to the villages, and the provision of decent health, education and social services. On the social and political landscape, unrecognized villages are virtually “invisible”. They do not appear on the official maps of the State of Israel and are not included in the figures of the Central Bureau of Statistics. The populations of these villages, many of which existed long before the creation of the state of Israel, range from 200 to 7,000 with an average of about 5,000.